NaPoWriMo!

Swinging Back In To Things

Sometimes I worry
I don't do enough for poetry.

But late tonight, sick,
in my bright bathroom light
while reading Geoffrey Young's
The Riot Act, I realized
good poetry will happen
or not happen with
or without me,

and the thought is very
comforting to me.

I missed Anthony's birthday, so I wrote this poem for him to make amends.

Our Friend Anthony Gaudio

Anthony came down from the suburbs
like a Brooklyn girl going out into America
for the first time, all innocence
and experience at once.

Tall and well-trained, Anthony
tries to tell if a fire is hazardous
or should be tolerated.

There isn’t much
that Anthony won’t tolerate,
he is an emotional trucker
who will trip only
when the situation calls
for a trip.

And, with his head way up
there in the stratosphere
above so many of us, Anthony
is a moonshot, when we go up
into space to check things out,
Anthony’s already there,
smiling and planetary-eyed.

Spring Cleaning

I am updating some stuff, and I don't know if this ever made it up here. It is an interview with Collin Kelley for his show Business of Words.

Bob Dylan's Coffee Table is my favorite blog.

Christmas in Damascus

When, underneath your hair,
all your skin has gone scabby
and dry, run for gin --
the Dutch spirit is rife
with juniper oil, and the
power of the conifer
is noted in Scandinavian texts
with lots of consonants in their titles.

And in your evergreen
health, every green roof
in rural Maryland will both
contrast and camouflage
itself in the wide
and verdant December
of our warm new millennium.

And in the library a long cat sits
with scabby skin,
waiting to be discovered
by the intrepid librarian --
the first awake
in this gray Atlantic morning.

Incorrigible Cake Licker

This Cake Won't Lick Itself
(thanks to Kris Chau)

Bouffant cake-licker,
with food floating before you
like a breath,
what will you tell those
who ask: why did your tongue
touch this cake?

Your face will not blush;
you jive with all the colors
of meats and pastries;
every day brings another pink
palette of comestibles
like dawn: pink tongue,
pink cake, pink stomach --

and poor cake has no mouth,
or it could take care of these matters
on its own.

Your Chevelle is sitting on my daughter.

Milwaukee Rachel has a new blog.

Check out the November 8 picture. Reminds me of Uncle Able's famous 1972 Chevelle.

Hank Thompson

It sounded like he was smiling
while he was singing, and
it was cause he was smiling, and
now young country singers
in Brooklyn and beyond
fold their mouths up at the ends
when they mouth off.

Everyone inside the honkytonk
is an angel when they smile.

For Dr. Johnson

some of us keep our Us with us

When we were very young, we were tweaked
into thinking: spelling would make us smart,
and where we put our words and commas
would make a mighty difference
when we walked out into the world.

But later on we, like, outsmarted
our former selves, and our vocabulary
broadened into a wide river. Muddy
or quickly clear, our speech traveled miles
and masticated mountains into sand.

Webster’s influential jingoism
resounds today: our words are shorter,
but we are still the same distance
from our neighbours on the other side
of the wild, wordy ocean.

None were quite like the #5 JCSH collaboration.

The code cracks among flavors: mixed
via market values, for instance:

do you know what the street value
of this poetry is?

or Jamaican for a plain

I'll cross to Gorrett's
for a late and tigery
piss: al fresco fit for a collar

but I'll be shaking them all tonight.

Your wide sound, yellow
June Bug resturante,
gold bug I talked to all night:

little bug, this advancement
in the limited society is
anttastic. You'll sidewalk

across my etymologi-call.
subversi-call,
conju-call

big predatory cat:

Number 3 from the JP.

with my face pushed in

w / o mine

eyes,see

theGlory o most

in the sofabed

1) I 2) mostly 3) Soaf

uh,

is un cassoulet por

those luxoriously lounging
in our naked living room

oui

luv tois

#2 live collaboration (JCSH live from JP) with cetera.

Her voice is the sound
of piss hitting the ground

and I am cont-uh-rary.
Mind the foreground,
things
loom

across
the room, across the
room
across the

acres of room
Plain as Jamaica
or other geography.

Live Cotter/Hall collaboration from a wooden bunker somewhere above Jamaica Plain.

Wished I'd smashed his face
when I had the chance,

but Australia's epic
had to parachute out of
the end of the end of
this party in Jamaica Plain.

Taquitos cussed,
cull of all,
the thrall of all
those Thriftstore Cowboys
makes for after hours--

and the Glass Slipper girls
especially bake
into the lonely
hangups of laundry. It's morning

and we have "things" here --
garments, laundrettes
and did I say
laundrettes?

SeptoPoWriMo etceterizes with another poem by Jamison Driskill!

love my bones my futon slopes to the middle

September is National Poetry Month!

This poem is not by me at all, but by Ashton Anders with a little help from Jamison Driskill.

The Meliae Nymphs

Sullen bows of earnest

In this ash tree town

Waver not in gail force winds;

Their leaves remain intact,

The shadows cast on open fields

Demanding their return of the land.

No one's fate is certain.

Everyone is subject to castration.

#9 Brooklyn Country Music Festival: Sestina for Merle Haggard

Merle in the Hole

A single, solitary Merle
spent some hours
in the legendary
San Quentin hole.
I like to think
he emerged haggard.

Haggard beard, haggard
as a tired smoky bear, Merle
had to think
for a few hours
or days in the hole.
More than a living legend,

there are no legends
surrounding Haggard.
He was really in that hole.
Oh thoughtful Merle,
alone for hours
what do you think?

There must've been some thinking
about God, and girls, and legendary
gin, and for hours
about his haggard
mother; it was a different Merle
came out of that hole.

That is the way with holes,
I was thinking
this morning. Merle
is a good man, a legendary
man; haggard
time is hours

in solitary. Hours
make days, and holes
make a Haggard.
I keep thinking
about his legendary
mom. Merle

Haggard, thinking
for hours in the hole,
you are a legendary Merle.

Brooklyn Country Music Festival numbers 3 through 8: Haiku for the Willie Nelson Family

Bee Spears

Helotes, Texas
hailed a bassier Bee,
far less bumbling

(Bee has a grandson named Catfish.)


Mickey Raphael

Second position:
your mouth-horn makes me quiver,
blades of new Spring grass

(Mickey flunked wood shop.)


Paul English

Busted : the Border
was as red as Autumn’s fire,
but so much hotter

(Paul has played with Willie for even longer than Bobbie’s been growing out her hair.)


Bobbie Nelson

Are you older than
you look? Or am I younger?
Let’s meet at Summer.

(Bobbie has been growing her hair out for the last forty years.)


Jody Payne

Joy indeed, Jody
is, at his age, a brand new
season: I’m inspired.

(Jody shares a birthday with Ray Price.)


Willie Nelson

Your voice is a smooth
and pretty rock, and your face
is December stone

#2 Brooklyn Country Music Festival

#1 Whisky Rebellion Ghazel

From a pickup in a pimpin’ tux, it’s not snake oil he’s sellin,’
but it comes from a jug and a washboard and guitars: the Whisky Rebellion!

Is it me or is Sammo sideways? It’s probably me;
this is the way I get when I get with the Whisky Rebellion!

Ol’ Andrew, ol’ Charlie, ol’ Shaky, ol’ Danny,
enough of an army to start a rebellion.

A rumbling in Brooklyn will start with some strumming,
then de-socking and boot knocking and Alex Battles’ Whisky Rebellion!!!

#1 Pantoum for the Brooklyn Country Music Festival

The Bakersfield Sound

Here’s to the shitkick
from old Bakersfield:
the punctuation changed
out West; the sound

from old Bakersfield
felt funny to Nashville;
back East the sound
wasn’t kicking just yet.

Funny old Nashville,
our Bakersfield sound
will shitkick you yet;
ol’ Buck Owens beats

give Bakersfield’s sound
its back, all wide and pink
as a Buck Owens tuxedo
and glittery as a Telecaster.

In back of a wide pink
Dwight Yoakam Cadillac
glittering like a Telecaster
the music got faster,

but Dwight’s pink Cadillacs
came here to shitkick;
the music got faster
but the punctuation’s the same.